What if Sitaram? | Papri Sen Sri Raman

BOOK REVIEW

The Fight for the Republic
by Sitaram Yechury

Pages: 120 pages
Price: Rs 250
Paperback
ISBN:978-81-979383-82
Publishers: Tulika Books with Sahmat

We’re not dreamers. We’re awaking from a dream turning into a nightmare. We’re not destroying anything. We’re watching the system destroy itself. —Slavoj Zizek

The Fight for the Republic is a slender book, the first of the Contemporary Themes series from Tulika Books, a publishing house that has brought out a range of intellectually stimulating books. The book is a collection of three essays by Indian Marxist Sitaram Yechury, with an introduction by the economist Prabhat Patnaik.

Patnaik, at the very outset, notes that one basic theme running through these essays is ‘reason versus unreason’.

Noting the ‘underlying intellectual position of these essays’, he says, although Yechury was an active party leader, he did not ‘resort to mere assertions, as is frequently the case’, in his writing. Which is what makes me quote Slavoj Zizek. In one outpouring of his angst, Zizek says, ‘The only way to survive such shitty times, if you ask me, is to write and read big, fat books, you know? And I’m writing now another book on Hegelian dialectics, subjectivity, ontology, quantum physics and so on. That’s the only way to survive. Like Lenin. I will use his example. You know what Lenin did, in 1915, when World War I exploded? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel.’

Yechury was writing when such ‘shitty times’ began. Let us look at his last essay in this book. It was first published in January-June 2021, in Marxist vol xxxvii, no 1-2; just after the two covid attacks in the world, after Narendra Modi’s second term began with banging on thalis and the Communist movement in the subcontinent was a hundred years old. Titled, India at 75, this essay is a critique of the communal Hindutva narrative raging through this ancient land. In its birth, Yechury points out, the RSS ‘heralded an intense battle of visions on what ought to be in the future, the character of a free India and its state structure’.

Explaining the ‘Intolerance’, embedded in this RSS vision, Yechury talks of a ‘third vision’ – the third vision ‘which argued that the character of independent India should be determined by the religious affiliation of its people’. In black & white, the Muslim League should champion an Islamic state and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu state. Gone with wind is any vision of keeping the state separate from religion.

Yechury points out that the Indian National Congress’ goal of keeping the state ‘a secular-democratic republic’ was never enough. The anti-imperial fight had to go hand-in-hand with ending feudalism and equitable distribution of wealth, capital and opportunity, both. The ‘idea of India’, Yechury tries to explain, is when the country is ready to move or moves toward ‘transcending its immense diversity in favour of a substantially-inclusive unity of its people’. The danger of acknowledging any such premise is that it leaves the battlefield wide open to the idea of one people, one language, one order, one political system, one party, one leader and consequently, one nation etc. etc.

Yechury calls this a ‘throwback Westphalian model’, a nineteen-century idea of what nationalism should mean – in other words, nationalism of the majority and the nationhood of the majority, over the minority populations in a country. Essentially what gave rise to European fascism. And has in the twenty-first century given rise to the Indian fascism.

As examples and astute explanations of this majoritarian ‘nationalism’ are the other two Yechury essays: Pseudo-Hinduism Exposed and What is Hindu Rashtra? They were both written in January 1993 and March 1993, in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, more than thirty years ago. I will desist from quoting from these and urge you to read the book. It has pleasant cover artwork by Ram Rahman, though the font size could have been more reader-friendly for young adults. What the book lacks is a small biographical note on, who was Sitaram Yechury?

For any modern young reader trying to understand Marxism in India, this book is a valuable tool. Yechury talks about the time when the right-wing RSS was a political ‘untouchable’ (this was after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, when the organisation was banned by then Home Minister Sardar Patel).

There was a time in free India when Marxists ruled at least three states and were a part of the Union Government. In some states like Bengal, every family had a few lefties, active members of either the Communist Party of India (CPI) or its several factions; including the CPI-M (Marxist) which actually was for years, the winning party. In Kerala, projects like the Kudumbashree had huge impact. There was immense national respect for people like Somnath Chatterjee. Yechury talks about the rise of the right-wing, but perhaps, this collection ought to have included a chapter on what went wrong for the Indian left, a Yechury perspective.

The book has come at a time when M A Baby, the smiling Kerala politburo member, has been elected general secretary of the CPI-M. Since the turn of the century, something wasn’t right in the left parties. Many many people, many from families traditionally affiliated to the communist parties, chose to leave the ‘party’ systems. This included writers, poets, musicians, artistes, ordinary citizens, the working polity; they were not understood. The CPI-M, in the intervening years, has lost two states; why did the party let go of Bengal and Tripura?

The hard-core, intransient ideologues, who believed at one point that only they were qualified to give the ‘party’ or parties direction, and who believed, their duty was to be anti-Congress, in a way facilitated the growth of the right-wing at the cost of the centralists in Indian politics. Although they have now retired (thanks to the mandatory retirement age) and moved out of the party’s ideological administration, isn’t it a bit too late to change the course of history in this subcontinent?

Even today, the party retains 85 old guards in the Central Committee and has included only 30 new entrants to the leadership cohort. Baby, on his election, said, ‘We don’t want to conceal the fact that there has been a decline in our strength. Unless we find out why this has happened, we will not be able to do a course correction’. Perhaps there is some hope now that left parties in India will get their act together.

Yechury headed the CPI-M’s international department, and the party used to depute him as fraternal delegate to the party conferences of most socialist countries. A prolific writer, he wrote the fortnightly column Left Hand Drive for Hindustan Times, a widely circulated daily. He edited the party newspaper People’s Democracy for 20 years. Yet, when it came to negotiations on the Indo-US nuclear deal of 2005, Yechury was overruled, and the party kept up its negative tirade against the Manmohan Singh government.

In, In Defence of Lost Causes, Zizek says, ‘Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology… we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.’ Perhaps that is what happened to Yechury’s party. As a diligent member, Yechury never felt he could assert himself and voice a more amenable, more ‘reasonable’ ideology. What if Sitaram Yechury (b. 12 August 1952 – d. 12 September 2024) had had a chance to voice his ‘thoughts’ and implement his ‘ideas’ as the General Secretary of the party (2015-2024)? Almost a decade is a long time to herald change. What if ‘reasonable people’ were given space in the CPI and CPI-M?

What if Sitaram’s voice was allowed to be heard louder instead of being buried in his writing? He writes: The counter-hegemony must be based on strengthening the basic struggles of the working people…. On the strength of these struggles, a larger unity with the likes of sections of society that came together in our epic freedom struggle needs to be built, to save India today in order to change it for a better tomorrow. In retrospection, many would want to imagine, what if Sitaram?